Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Boss Says Restrictive DRM Is a Waste of Time
Stoobalou writes "Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle. His company — which is responsible for one of the biggest video games of all time, the addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft — is to release StarCraft 2 on July 27, and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won't be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes that have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late. StarCraft 2 will require a single online activation using the company's Battle.net servers, after which players will be allowed to play the single-player game to their hearts' content, without being forced to have a persistent Internet connection."
Seriously, this is why I love this company. Ever since being a young kid playing Warcraft Orc and Humans, then playing multiplayer against my dad, I've known they make quality games, how they want, when they are ready. I still play Diablo 2 to this day, completing Hell difficultly on Hardcore still gives me a feeling of achievement lacking in recent games!
So it's still only good until the server dies? Or are you going to be able to back up the activation?
And here Blizzard has a trick : WoW requires a monthly fee. So used games resell aren't a "threat" to its income.
StarCraft 2 would essentially be played online thru its battle.net servers and there you will need to have a valid account and register your game, as you would need to with Ubisoft. No one plays offline and alone.
Ubisoft's AssassinCreed2 is a game you can play only alone. So the "phoning home" from the DRM is artificial while it is "hidden" in games with a naturally online gameplay.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Clearly, Blizzard doesn't want your sales.
LAN is what made StarCraft the dynamo that it is. By removing that, they've removed all incentive for most people to buy the game.
They could only have two possible reasons to not include LAN (especially considering that it's coded and everything..) and those reasons are copyright infringement (stupid) and being the gatekeeper for all things StarCraft (really stupid).
It won't affect copyright infringement because nothing affects copyright infringement. Not law, not dogma, not stupid commercials, not DRM, absolutely nothing. Hell, the beta was cracked so you could play without a beta key.
If they want to be the gatekeeper for all things StarCraft, they can blow it out their asses. If I buy a game, it is mine to use when I want, how I want. Obviously this doesn't hold in a mass-user environment such as Battle.net, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Because they do not offer this seemingly normal feature, I'm not buying from them. I loved StarCraft to death, but StarCraft II is not worth it if it isn't my game when I buy it. I encourage many others to do the same if that's how they feel.
I had to once work on a computer for someone who had an app that installed off of a dozen or so floppies, and on the last one, it moved a file off the floppy to the hard drive, rather than copying it. If you told the program to uninstall itself, you were actually prompted to insert that last floppy, so the license file could be moved back. Unfortunately, the person who had the computer did not know enough to back up the computer, or even the floppy set, so when their computer crashed, we were unable to reinstall that program without jumping through a bunch of hoops with the company who sold it...
I have a few points to make. I would post directly to the relevant comments, but that would take too long.
A) A history of letting you not need the disc in the drive anymore after a patch is NOT really a friendly way of stripping away DRM once the "hype" dies down. Besides, people are getting the dates wrong here, Starcraft removed needing the disc with patch 1.15, which was released almost ten years after the game debuted. Requiring online activation of a unique code is apples-to-oranges with keeping a disc in the drive.
B) People still do have LAN parties, especially Starcraft enthusiasts! It's a classic of the LAN party, and was by far the most-played at the last one I went to. Now, I'm not sure how much data is actually launched up and down the tubes when you're playing online, but if you have a lousy ISP, or not the highest-speed service, having eight people all stacked up on one connection playing that game might be a bit much, especially if you have an ISP that throttles, or imposes other crappy limits, or, in my case, one that likes to disconnect for random periods of time, especially during the night.
B2) The above point, either way, shouldn't be a matter of if it is or isn't a hassle, it should be a matter of, just because you can, doesn't mean you should have to.
C) This whole discussion is instantly destroyed by the level of fanboyism for Blizzard, and the level of anti-fanboyism as well. I'm probably going to get modded down to comment hell for this post, for example. This is becoming a matter of "Awh, shucks, Blizzard are such great guys! I bet they'd buy me a new computer if my current one couldn't run Starcraft II" versus "DRM IS COCKS!!! GO DIE!!!"
D) That being said, I really see no reason for anyone who loves SC1 to get SC2. I played the beta, it's pretty much just feels like a modded, or expansion-packed, or remastered SC1, with some bits from Relic's RTSes pasted on. I think the best way to avoid the alleged hassle of SC2 is to just... keep playing SC1.
E) I think my biggest issue here, and the one I will leave off with (leaving out comments about stat tracking and achievement farming and whatnot), is just that Blizzard here is stating, and their fanboys in the room are happily restating, is that, put simply, they are awesome because they aren't doing what Ubisoft is doing. Even though they aren't as bad as Ubi, they're just as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the market in this matter. They're still being 'bad', they just aren't the 'worst'. But they're still being bad.
Blizzard forever lost me as a customer when they removed LAN play from their games, and sued the bnetd developers for restoring the feature. As far as I'm concerned, Blizzard and Microsoft are part of the same Axis of Evil (but for different reasons).
Having been poked in the eye with a stick once, I have to say, activating a game online induces far less blindness and ball-shriveling pain than being poked in the eye with a stick.
Sure, its not ideal, but since when do we live in an ideal world? hell, if it was all rainbows and puppies, there would be no DRM, and every game produced would be mailed to you free of charge on the release date.
However, the fact of the matter is, Blizzard put years of work into making this game, spending God only knows how much money paying developers. Seeing as they are not the Omnipotent Benevolent beings you desire, they find the need to attempt to ensure that the product they have created makes a large enough financial return that they don't lose money. Thus, they conclude, because its not all puppies and rainbows out there, that they will require an activation, thus creating a locked glass door that keeps the honest people honest.
I have no illusions, DRM/activation/CDkeys/whatever are all Locked Glass Doors. If you want in badly enough, you brick the door and walk in, but to 90% of the population, a locked glass door means 'oh, i guess i have to follow the rules' . So as soon as the world is all rainbows, puppies and sunshine, you can have your damn DRM free games, but until then, all we can do is bitch about it, which really seems to not help much.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.